ReadWriteWeb

The semantic web is one of the leading trends we track here at ReadWriteWeb, so it was big news to us earlier this month when Evri announced it was acquiring Twine creators Radar Networks. Following the announcement, Twine CEO Nova Spivack wrote an inspiring and lengthy farewell blog post detailing the acquisition, and the story behind the development and growth of Twine. Towards the end of the post, Spivack outlined some lessons for budding entrepreneurs based on what he learned through his startup experience.

This month, two painful but impossible to ignore facts have emerged about mobile use by business. First, research from Forrester suggests IT support for business use of personal mobile devices has a big impact on enterprise collaboration, with fewer of the challenges that new technology like cloud computing present.

Second, a new report from Gartner asserts that despite mobile IT support just beginning to really blossom, a full 80% of businesses will spend more than they need to on voice and data costs in the next five years. That dichotomy, the one between big expectations and overeager spending, is a paradigm that could cripple the sustainable growth of mobile in the enterprise.

While the U.S. economy is still puttering through a recession, a new marketing study from the National Retail Federation's Shop.org and Forrester Research found that at least some online retailers have been able to take greater marketshare in the last few months. About 46% of the 117 retailers polled in this study also said that they had no plans to scale back their original budgets for 2009, though 54% of all respondents expect their overall growth to slow during the next 12 months. Over the last few months, shoppers have become increasingly price-sensitive, and this has clearly helped some online retailers to outperform their brick-and-mortar competitors.

In a recession, budgets are tightened, jobs are cut, and those who remain are expected to do more with less. Given this type of economic reality, it's surprising to hear of an industry reporting an increase in spending on anything, much less on something as new as social media. Yet that's exactly what's occurring. According to a new Forrester Research survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees, the use of social media as a marketing tool is on the rise. What's more, Forrester reports that over 50% of marketers said they will be increasing their spending on social media marketing in the coming months.